“No other proof”: Svetlana Aleksievich in the tradition of Soviet war writing

Abstract

ABSTRACTSvetlana Aleksievich’s work has traditionally been analyzed through the lenses of history, ethnography, and memory studies. However, this article suggests that there is another, equally important, component to her work: its engagement with the question of how adequately to represent the past in prose. This article makes three claims: first, that Aleksievich’s unique form – collages of ostensibly unaltered voices – emerged directly from the tradition of Soviet literary writing about the Second World War. Second, it argues that Aleksievich’s concept of “women’s war” (developed in her first book, The Unwomanly Face of War, 1985), in addition to being an attempt to remedy the peripheral position of the depiction of women’s frontline experiences in Soviet culture, derives from her search for an anti-canonical, and hence more truthful, way of depicting the past. Finally, it argues that, in its suspicion of “art” and turn towards “ordinary life,” Aleksievich’s work is the culmination of a representational strategy developed by Soviet writers that attempts to get beyond mimetic convention by tying “truthful” depiction to the recovery of experience. In general, this article situates Aleksievich’s work within scholarly debates about the limits of representation and the stakes and implications of representing the past.